Click image to see the 2004 letter to the AAO-HNS from KJ Lee, MD, Coordinator for International Affairs for Société Française d’ORL et de Chirurgie de la Face et du Cou.

The exchange of ideas at international meetings and at the AAO-HNSF’s Annual Meeting & OTO Experience provides an excellent platform for discussion and the sharing of knowledge, covering a broad range of clinical information and other issues of mutual interest. Each year, Academy/Foundation leadership recognizes a select number of countries that work to significantly advance the specialty on a global scale, by designating those countries as International Guests of Honor at the Academy’s Annual Meeting.

The Academy is pleased to welcome and honor the Republic of France and the Société Française d’ORL et de Chirurgie de la Face et du Cou (the French ENT Head and Neck Surgery Society) leadership, members, colleagues, and friends from the country to the 2017 Annual Meeting & OTO Experience.

The Société was formally affiliated with the AAO-HNSF in the International Corresponding Societies (ICS) network during the tenure of KJ Lee, MD, Coordinator for International Affairs in 2004. Professor Frédéric Chabolle, then General Secretary, Société Française d’ORL et de Chirurgie de la Face et du Cou, expressed interest in establishing links with the AAO-HNS in a letter to Dr. Lee, which is available online.

Excerpt by Professor Francois Legent, former president of the French Society of ORL-1997, University of Nantes.

“The first meeting of the Société Française d’Oto-Rhino-Laryngologie on Tuesday, November 21, 1882, is well known. It is at least the date in which the founders of The French Society of Otolaryngology and Laryngology, the ancestor of our present-day society, which changed its name according to the internal upheavals and changes in the specialty. On that day, 14 Parisians, two provincials and a Belgian colleague accepted the project of Emile Moure, ENT in Bordeaux. This physician was in fact one of the rare ORLS of the time, like Baratoux in Paris, to claim competence in the two branches of the new specialty, most of the confreres appearing either as otologists or as laryngologists, much less numerous. Among the attendees at this constituent meeting, alongside Moure, there were several specialists who left at least one book or publications, if not a name. This includes Baratoux, Bonnafont, Boucheron, Cadier, Garrigou-Desarenes, Gelle, Gougenheim, Levi, Meniere, Miot, and Moura-Bourouillu.”